Poland: President Kaczynski’s Tu-154 destroyed by explosion

Thursday, January 11, 2018 9:00:56 AM

The commission of the Polish Ministry of Defense, in re-investigating the causes of the crash of the president’s Tu-154, recognized the conclusions of the technical report, which states that the plane was destroyed by an explosion. This conclusion was made at the plenary session of the commission on January 10.

“The left wing of the Tu-154 was destroyed by an internal explosion,” the commission said. In addition, it was stated that on board there were “several sources of the explosion: in the wing, flaps, and in the center [of the wing].” This is supposedly “confirmed by an analysis of the impact on the aircraft’s door on the ground.” One of the main conclusions of the previous commission – that the wing of the plane was destroyed when it hit a birch tree – is also disputed. The collision with the tree was, supposedly, not at all the cause of the damage to the wing.

The Commission recognized these three statements as “one of the key findings of the technical report.”

The commission issued a similar statement the day after the resignation of Polish Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz. He advocated the resumption of the Tu-154 crash investigation and stated that he considers the plane crash to be a terrorist attack. The head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Mariusz Blaschak, was appointed the new Minister of Defense.

In October, Macierewicz claimed that the commission found a record of an explosion on one of the airplane’s flight recorders. In August, a representative of the commission said that signs of an explosion had been found on the left wing of the aircraft.

The Tu-154 crashed on April 10, 2010, killing all 96 passengers on board, including the President of Poland Lech Kaczynski. In 2011, the Polish National Committee said that the crash occurred because the plane descended too early due to poor visibility, and this led to a collision with a tree. The decision to reconsider the commission’s conclusion was made after the leader of the Law and Justice Party, Jarosław Kaczyński, came to power in 2015. The commission’s final report of the new investigation will be submitted before the end of spring 2018.